


if you must die, my love

by okayantigone



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Episode S2E08: End Times, they were in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 21:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17312159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone
Summary: die knowing that your life was my life's best part.





	if you must die, my love

**Author's Note:**

> im sad

There is a castle on a cloud, rising it’s sharp towers like black beaked roosters screeching into a rising sun, where the light breaks through tall windows spun of sugar, and floors are paved with gold. 

There is a man who lives in the castle, handsome prince of shadows, and he sits in his throne every day and he waits, and when the wait is finally over, he stands up and dusts himself off, casts down his fur cloak, at last, and straightens his battle-worn shoulders. 

He descends the staircase, marble hands tracing the line of the bannisters where once a golden child screeched and slid down them with the song of youth trapped in his still-small throat. 

Now the child stands confused at the bottom of the stairs, and Vladislav cannot comfort him. For a moment, Adrian looks up, and their eyes meet. 

“Is this how the castle always felt for you?” 

He could answer, perhaps, but his words won’t reach. He knows this much. has known death inside and out for years. He is of death – harbringer and victim. And the castle is what the castle has always been – a tomb of ghosts. The boyars who had betrayed his father, the enemies who had sought his throne, the friends who had turned to his back with knives, the human family he had lost in the human war, and now the ghost of another woman he could not save, and another son who looks to him with disappointment and regret. 

“Oh, my love. But we were so happy here once, weren’t we?” When he looks at the landing, there stands Lisa from Lupu, her hair spun from gold, her eyes shiny and bright like a dream. 

Something lodges itself in his throat, where the hunger lives. He can’t seem to swallow past it. He drinks her in, starving, dying and dead, she who had sung to him at the breaking of each dawn until he wasn’t afraid to close his eyes and succumb to the daylight, she who threaded her slender fingers through his hair, unafraid, she whom he had loved, and still had not saved. 

He’d be happy, like this. Just to look at her. For a hundred years. A thousand years. 

“I am a fool,” he whispers, at last. “I am a wretched, cursed fool.” 

She, who had waded through an ocean of corpses and a forest of pikes to come fall at his door. 

“Shh,” she says, and reaches up. Her hands, warm, and soft, and made for healing only, her fingers smoothing his cheekbones, taking away the years and the pain. 

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. The thing in his throat has claws digging into his thrachea, and pulls at his tear ducts. When he cries, the tears come out wet, and clear – just water and salt, just human tears. “I’m so sorry I didn’t save you. I can never save anyone.” 

Her fingers brush under his eyes, pick up the moisture, and clean away the dark bags there, smooth the crow’s feet. She has always had the gift in life, to fix him just right, as she does now too. 

“But you did,” her voice is as hard and earnest as that first day, she is made of light, he’d thought sometimes, made of so much light she could burn him. “You saved me so many times before. It’s not your fault that they didn’t know better.” 

He bends low for her, touches his forehead to hers, breathes in her sunlit scent, warmth, and daytime, and fresh cut wheat, golden, beautiful things that made up the only woman in the whole wide world. He breathes her in, and doesn’t dare touch her. 

“I called out for you,” she says quietly, “I kept calling and calling you, and you didn’t hear me. I wanted to warn you about Carmilla. Did you know Isaac killed Godbrand? I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you to stop.”

“I know,” he breathes. “I know. I’ve stopped now. I’m done now. I was so tired. God, I was so – I just wanted it done.” 

“It’s over,” she says. “It’s over. There’s no more fighting. There’s no more war. You didn’t do any damage that couldn’t be fixed. It’s time you let all these old wounds heal.” 

Just like that. It’s over. God. What a sensible woman. 

He wraps his arms around her, unthinking, and for a moment, his heart is gripped with nothing but fear that she will fall apart, turn to so much ash, but she doesn’t. She is right there, in his arms. And when he digs his fingers in her dress, and in her hair, there are no talons – just his human fingers, scarred, callused from years of wielding a sword, and she fits against his chest like the missing piece of a puzzle he hadn’t known he was trying to solve. 

And she does too, gripping the breadth of his shoulders, her fingers digging into his skin, now soft and warm with humanity. Death hath undone all he did to himself, or maybe her love did, and either way, now, again, he is fixed, made alive again in his own death, made again whole, only in her arms. 

He had destroyed so many things, it couldn’t possibly be fair that he would get this. She hides her face in his neck, a ghostly pulse beneath her lips. 

“But not us, my love.” She says. “Never us. You and me? We were solid. We were it. The last year doesn’t count. It doesn’t. It doesn’t.”

He wants to believe her. So he does. 

And her arms are around him. Sun breaks its way through the high windows, glittering off the shards of broken glass after the fight. 

“Remember our first dance?” she slides a hand down his arm, until her fingers and his are intertwined.

“How could I ever forget?” Finding her waist is pure instinct. He can’t bear to pull too far away, lips still resting against her hair. Her feet make no noise on the stone of the great entrance hall, where his father had once commanded his armies. 

There is a castle on a cloud, rising it’s sharp towers like black beaked roosters screeching into a rising sun, where the light breaks through tall windows spun of sugar, and floors are paved with gold. And they had been so happy here once.


End file.
